You haven’t really demonstrated how avoiding suffering is anything but natural.
that’s true, avoiding suffering is something derived from its opposite. The point here though is that from a spiritual perspective, you would want to be born into a world where you can live with the minimum amount of suffering, and certainly with the maximums removed [torture, painful deaths etc].
We could say that is human, and that includes a spiritual side to it ~ if we include it. Hence we should be making the effort to remove suffering rather than ignoring it. Nature mostly ignores suffering when it occurs to others, humanity makes a difference societally by introducing precedents by which we work to remove sufferings. Religion has been part of that, though naturally we can do the same things without it.
I suppose then, we could ask if we need something like religion for such an ethics implementation, do we need at least a spiritual perspective even if we don’t know if that exists [to use it as the potential that it does]? Why shouldn’t we be entirely selfish and not care if others suffer. I think religion or spirituality gives the selfish an extra impetus to be unselfish, it’s a kind of philosophical socialism or could/should be.
…the thread was aimed at the religious perspective and as a challenge to any such doctrine which seeks to do otherwise.
Obviously anything is included if we include it. Your reasoning to support your claims hasn’t been very solid or rigorous in this thread. But I suppose if it was aimed at the religious, it doesn’t have to be.
You’re just cherry picking points rather than debating the topic as presented.
What I meant was that we have included it historically but we don’t have to include it, and that we can if we want and then humanity has a spiritual side to it.
I could say that suffering is only spiritual if we consider the mind to also be spiritual, and that if we were merely organic robots there would be nothing there experiencing pain. However we have had such debates in the philosophy forums, and my point here was purely in terms of a religious-philosophical ethic. Saying anything but that would take it all off topic.
The topic as presented is muddled and full of claims without justification. But, I think you tend to have a fairly muddled thought process in general. Or at least, if it’s not muddled, your presentation of it often is.
For example, this suggests to me a pretty muddled, confused thought process:
So, humanity has a spiritual side to it if we want to include it, but not if we don’t? If we don’t want to include it, humanity doesn’t have a spiritual side?
Sure ~ as we don’t know the answer to the question; does spirit exist, then yes you can include it if you think it does or not if you don’t think spirit exists. Clear and simple.
A 7 yr old could understand the op! 
…not that I dont appreciate your questions, I just think they take us into territory outside the context presented, and where there are many other debates which deal with such questions.
Yeah 'tis not the first time he has insisted on opposites like dark being the opposite of light, er no it isn’t that is the lack of light, that would in fact be something that doesn’t exist as photons are their own antiparticle. Just a different combination of quarks. Light does the same in any configuration, it therefore has no opposite. Some things do some things don’t. It’s not a basis for a coherent philosophy.
^^ interesting about light. So are there very few or no opposites? Is the I-ching fucked? I mean even with something seemingly straight-forwards like the sexes, opposites aren’t so clear.
- magnetism surely has opposites in its polarity?
Flip it.
If there is no light, then there is darkness? Or is there nothing?
Because darkness has no opposite, or because it is missing light?
Are you trying to say that light and dark are the same thing, just in a different state, like water? (Very likely.)
Or maybe you’re trying to say that light fits into nothing, thus the creation of light.
but if this any of this is true that must mean there is an opposition to attract light into its appearance.
Everything has a reaction, because everything is acting upon something else. wither that something is acting upon nothing, or vise verse.
Wow, this doesn’t make sense? It’s time to get your heads out of the textbook.
In holistic terms light and dark like day and night are opposites, but beyond that what is darkness, more an emptiness and so not just opposite of light but of everything.
No I’m trying to say darkness is not the opposite of light, in fact absolute darkness does not exist.
Get your head in a text book, couldn’t hurt. 
To explain a little further light and “anti-light” are made up of different quarks anti and other, with different properties fundamentally, but because they inherently have the same overall properties they behave in the same way.
Light can produce interference fringes where supposedly there is a lack of observable energy but these points are not zero energy points, they are just light cancelling it’s wavelengths out with others. There’s no such thing as 0 energy, and there’s no such thing as anti-light.
Sound waves have sound and anti-sound, their wavelengths are diametrically opposed too sometimes, when they meet they are cancelled out to produce no sound we can observe, but the energy of both waves still exists in the areas where sound can be heard. The quantum is a little different but as an analogy it is not so troublesome.
uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Anti-Light
Read this it will all become clear. 
Perfect.
Notice how I never said anything of an opposite. (Besides asking if.)*
You’ve explained the positive and negative effect of light waves on itself.
(Btw, did you actually read this anti-light wiki article? Kind of science fictional. Though I am a fan of zombies)
The primary motive of religion of any format is evocative emotional control of perception.
The divine anxiety of life is effectively leveraging emotional control into a satisfactory emotional result in both quality and magnitude.
We, homo sapiens sapiens, did not have to have this, but we did increase our brain size due to a lack of jaw muscle and became capable of developing marked increase in empathetic and sympathetic emotional sensory which became incredibly gainful in growth and progression.
Part of that tax in this format is reverberation and excitement (literal meaning - as in particles).
Consequence of increased sensitivity to a new range of receiving reverberations and excitement of electrochemical subconscious sensations is a need for dissipation and recess, or there is a fallout of some form that will occur.
Religion, circling back to the first sentence, is primarily motivated by accessing a method of control of this regulation in some producible manner.
It can be used by the individual and of their own accord, or it can be used by others as a leverage of control over individuals for whatever means is seen of pursuit.
That is to say, it can be evoked by an internal motive entirely, or it may be evoked by a mixture of internal and external motives.
It also needs not be religious.
Self help is littered with attempts at offering similar controls.
Music can itself be another for a great deal of people.
However, religion is one fashion of this medium.
It is also the most mature of the systems and this is possibly why it remains so prominently.
It has been around for such a considerable length more, which allows for humanity to layer and layer the complex articulations of the tool sets involved in the medium.
That is what humans do best; we build upon what we have before built.
We increase the articulation of what we have had before by adding unto it a greater depth, diversity, or efficiency.
Had we started some of the modern self help concepts seven thousand years ago, then it would be equally as functionally embedded into our socioeconomic culture as religion is today.
Perhaps with the extra sensitivity of the modern brain, we equally ‘needed’ some manner of basis for thinking like that, and that’s where religion comes into it. I think humans generally have this perception which requires a manner of fulfilment, it drives us on all manner of quests for truth and meaning in our lives.
To accompany that the brain has this ’god-helmet’ ability to produce internal imagery and meaning, and present it as if outside ~ as like we experience one another. In one of my visions the imagery was perfectly described in the Egyptian book of the dead ~ which I had never read or heard of at the time, and it wasn’t a common image. Hence I think there is more to it than simply the brain being a composer of realities.
Indeed I’ll go on to say that there is something outside of us to wit such visions and poetry etc react. The world is the composer, the brain a player in the orchestra.
Or to put it another way, the brain develops and extend according to what’s out there!
Something like this…
_
I tend to see it as this:
Giraffes don’t need the long necks to reach the tree leaves.
Their long necks ended up being a mutation which conveniently allowed for reaching the tree leaves.
Or:
Humans don’t need ground for walking.
Humans don’t have legs that need fulfillment of walking.
But because we have legs as we do, we can walk on the ground.
We don’t have a perception which requires a manner of fulfillment.
We have a brain which articulates an acumen in a multidimensional (not meaning physics; dimension as in form) range of sense, assessment, and response to a great caliber in inherent problem solving and long view causal sequencing with an interest towards utilitarian value beyond other great apes.
I wouldn’t say that truth seeking is a requirement.
More so a consequence.
Hmm maybe, but I don’t think we got bigger brains because we simply grew them anyways for no reason [genetic mutation or whathaveyou], we got them because the former brain detected a need which was later fulfilled. The giraffe did require longer necks due to competition on the lower leaves, I expect that many animals stretched to reach the lush green leaves, then as the giraffe gained the advantage other animals have greater access to the lower leaves ~ as the giraffe was now eating the higher ones.
Creatures are extremely sensitive machines! We cannot ignore that we live in an informational universe, and that creatures will desire ever more access to that as they develop. Knowing more gains the advantage in many cases I’d think.
I did I LMAO. Uncyclopaedia is cool, shame the comedians don’t get paid for there services to disinformation. 
No.
It quite literally occurred as a result of having a weaker jaw muscle, which occurred due to a mutation in some hominids, whereby the MYH16 gene had a mutation that caused that gene to not function.
The primary result is that the masseter and temporalis are greatly reduced in size from our earlier fossil examples of other hominids (or present other great apes).
Here’s the muscle set on us.
And because it’s nearly a wafer size by comparison, while we grow, our skulls are not restricted in volume due to an overlapping muscle.
See the differences of skull impressions here:
That ridge (6) is the dividing point between the two temporalis muscles which literally draw forcibly down upon the skull as leverage.
It wasn’t an advantage that our brains aimed for.
Just as the fly does not exist as a pest to humans so that humans may learn patience.
A mutation happened, it could have sucked, but it became a dominant genetic trait that passed in two pair carries into the offspring, and arrived on the scene when hominids appear to have been at a higher peak of interbreeding between varying hominids.
…which may very well have consequently caused the mutation to begin with.
Note…this did not mean that we could articulately speak in language yet.
That came later with yet another gene mutation.
This sounds controversial? Do you have any decent links to this idea or is it one of your own. Probably cooler if its one of your own, but evolution is never pinned down a simple phenotype like that, there are always other factors in play…
Sure, it was published in Nature, but here’s a link to a free spot of the pdf.
sapientfridge.org/chromosome_cou … tation.pdf